Swede was at the cradle of Torrevieja tourism

The Swedish globetrotter Nils Gabel was at the cradle of the flourishing tourism industry on the southern Costa Blanca. He put Torrevieja, and more specifically La Mata, on the map for Europeans who craved sun and sea. It was the late 1950s. Local politicians occasionally chatted in the back rooms about the potential of their city for visitors. But it was just daydreaming. Wish was the father of the thought. Concrete initiatives failed to materialize.

Nils Gabel turned dreams into decisiveness. While wandering by sea he set foot in La Mata and declared that he had found paradise. The image of the Swedish pioneer in La Mata is the rightful salute to a man who initiated the transformation of the sleepy fishing village into a tourist powerhouse.
Nils Gabel was an enterprising man who, with his wife and four small children, left Sweden for an uncertain adventure on the Mediterranean. He negotiated the purchase of a piece of land now known as Lomas del Mar. There he built about 150 large houses for Swedish settlers in 1962. A guess. But it worked.

Many of his fellow countrymen shared Gabel's enthusiasm for the 'promised land'. Where the local administrators initially doubted the possible appeal of the arid and somewhat remote country, the northerners walled in the climatic blessings of Torrevieja.

Oh, it was not easy for the Swedes to reach their dream destination. At that time there were no airports in Alicante or San Javier. Potential buyers had to take a boat to Alicante after a flight to Mallorca and from there to reach La Mata by taxi. It didn't deter them. The Swedish colony grew in a number of years to 500. That was the time when Torrevieja had a total of about 10,000 inhabitants. After Lomas del Mar, Cabo Roig and Dehesa de Campoamor turned out to be favorite places for the Scandinavians to settle.

The right of Nils Gabel to realize his dream and to believe in the potential of Torrevieja, is perhaps best expressed in cold numbers. The houses he built in 1962 turned out to be a great investment for buyers. Just ten years later, homes (even indexed after inflation) were sold 15-fold.